Feature-packed and easy to use, CyberLink PowerDirector has always
been one of the better consumer video editors. Of course there’s always
room for improvement, though, and the latest version, PowerDirector 10 Ultra, has some very interesting additions.
Full 3D editing support allows you to import 3D videos and photos, or
convert 2D media to 3D, then enhance these with 3D effects, titles,
transitions and more. New 2D effects include a time-lapse tool, or
support for recording hand-drawn animations (signing your name, say),
and playing them back within a video.

Plug-in support delivers 10 new "art effects" (“hand drawn”, "pastel"
and so on). And there are smarter audio tools, more video sharing
options, and ease of use improvements, as well as speed boosts which
could see movie rendering time cut in half.
Sounds good. But how does the program behave in real life? We took a closer look.

Interface
Launch PowerDirector 10 Ultra and
you’re presented with a familiar three-pane editing interface: media
files, effects, transitions and more are displayed top-left; an
excellent preview window (including the option to preview in a secondary
2D or 3D display) is top-right; and there’s a 100-track timeline across
the bottom of the screen, where you may drag and drop clips and effects
to build up your movie.
Four buttons at the top of the screen offer further guidance. By
default the Edit option is selected, but you may also click Capture, to
import media directly from DV or HDV camcorders, webcams, microphones
and more; clicking Produce allows you to turn your movie into a video,
or upload it online; and Create Disc presents a host of disc and menu
authoring options.
This isn’t an entirely perfect arrangement. You can’t simply use the
Media Room to browse to a folder and examine its contents, for instance:
you have to import particular files or folders, and then view them.
We’d appreciate more thumbnail size options (right now you get 80 pixel,
100 pixel, and that’s it), and initially at least the sheer number of
buttons and right-click options can be intimidating.
In general, the interface is well-designed and easy-to-use, though,
with tooltips and quality documentation to walk you through any initial
problems. And some useful new additions will further simplify your life.
Video clips on the timeline may now be displayed as continuous
thumbnails, for instance, helping you see where scenes start and
end. Right-clicking the timeline ruler at a particular point allows you
to add a custom-named timeline marker ("At the beach"). Other media
files snap to these, making it easier to precisely position your
content.
And similarly, the new Automatic Beat Detection tool can analyze a
soundtrack and add its own timeline markers to highlight major changes,
helping you synchronize effects and transitions with your music. This
isn’t a magic solution -- if the track varies only subtly then you may
get no markers or way too many -- but with the right source material it
could save you a lot of time (and it only takes a few seconds to try).

3D Editing
The biggest headline addition to PowerDirector 10 Ultra is
probably 3D editing; the program has fallen behind here, but this
release sees CyberLink do a good job of catching up with the
competition.
There’s reasonable support for importing 3D video and image formats,
for instance (MVC .MTS, dual stream AVI, side-by-side, over-under, MPO
and JPS are all covered). Sometimes the program doesn’t realize you’ve
opened a 3D file, though, so you have to inform it of this fact manually
(these can be hard to recognize but it’s still annoying).
You’ve no 3D source material? Not a problem: CyberLink’s TrueTheater
3D technology (imported from PowerDVD) automatically converts 2D movies
to 3D. In our tests the quality of the end result varies greatly
depending on your source material, but you can at least tweak it by
dragging a "scene depth" slider, and if nothing else it’s a fun way to
enhance old home movies.
And once you’ve got your 3D clips then they can be enhanced in
various ways. Click the Effects tab, say, and you’ll find 19 attractive,
if slightly gimmicky 3D-specific effects (snow, fireworks, bubbles and
so on); there are also 10 3D transitions, 10 particle effects and more
to keep the theme going.
The existing title, particle and PiP effects can also be given a 3D
touch, though this isn’t exactly obvious (with titles, say, you must
open the Title Designer, click the Animation Properties tab and check
"Enable 3D depth").
And when it’s finished you may export your masterpiece as 3D video
(MVC, half or full-size side-by-side or anaglyph formats); upload it
directly to YouTube as a 3D movie; or author a 3D DVD, BD or AVCHD disc.
(PowerDirector only provides 2 3D menu templates but it’s easy to
create more, and doubtless you’ll soon be able to download plenty for
free from CyberLink’s DirectorZone.)
This is genuine end-to-end 3D editing, then. Most of the 3D effects
are nothing special, though; and some of the 3D options are a little
hidden, so it can take a while to figure out what you need to do. Still,
the new 3D abilities are a worthwhile addition, and we’ll be interested
to see how they develop in future.

Effects
If you’re more interested in what you can do with 2D movies, then one
notable addition this time around is the new support for plugin-based
effects.
The only currently visible sign of this is the inclusion of an Art
Effects category ("Air Brush", “Pastel”, "Metallic" and so on). While
not the kind of effects you’ll use every day, they can deliver
spectacular results, and most are very configurable. (The "Metallic"
option allows you to set the base metal colour, and provides 5 other
attributes you can tweak via sliders.)
Of course, the whole point of supporting plugins is that an
application becomes more extensible, and disappointingly, PowerDirector
isn’t there yet: CyberLink says the ability to add other NewBlue plugins
won’t arrive until a “future version”. A pity, but the 10 new Art
Effects are welcome anyway, and this does at least hold some promise for
future developments.
Elsewhere, the Slideshow Creator wizard has a new time-lapse style.
Import your sequence of photos, choose the duration of each image and
(optionally) the number images to skip between each displayed photo, and
that’s it: your finished video will be ready within moments.
And in a useful creative touch, the Picture-in-Picture Objects room
has been extended with new Paint Animations, allowing you to record
hand-drawn animations and include them in the video. So it’s easy to,
say, draw an arrow to highlight something of interest in a shot. Or you
could capture a dynamic clip of your signature gradually appearing, save
this as a PiP object, then just drag and drop it onto the end of
everything you create: very convenient.

Performance
PowerDirector has always been one of the fastest consumer video
editors, but of course rendering is still a lengthy business -- so it’s
good to see CyberLink has continued to focus on performance.
Startup time proved excellent on our Intel Core i7 test PC (running
32-bit Windows 7), for instance, at 5.6 seconds. (For comparison, the
new MAGIX Movie Edit Pro MX Plus averaged 12.75 seconds.)
New OpenCL support means that effects preview and rendering now
benefits from GPU-based hardware acceleration, and this can have
impressive results. We used 9 1080p clips to create a 3×3 video wall,
and incorporated a couple of effects; without OpenCL the project took 45
minutes and 15 seconds to render as an H.264 clip, with OpenCL this
dropped to 20:34 – a 220% speed boost.
You won’t necessarily see this improvement every time, of course: if
you’re using less clips, or don’t employ effects which support OpenCL
(possible, although 48 do), then the benefits over previous versions
won’t be as apparent. Although you shouldn’t feel short-changed. Simply
joining 4 full HD MP4 clips took 13:04 in MAGIX Movie Edit Pro MX Plus;
PowerDirector 10 did the same job in 4:12, more than three times as
fast.
And if all the video output options confuse you, then the new
Intelligent SVRT (Smart Video Rendering Technology) dialog should help:
in a click it shows you the most appropriate and efficient video
profiles for encoding your project. This isn’t always useful information
-- you may already know exactly what sort of video you need, and it
doesn’t always tell you which profile will be faster anyway -- but it
only takes a couple of seconds to display, and is still a feature worth
having.

Other Features
There are plenty of other new features in PowerDirector 10, too.
Launch the program, for instance, and you have the option to choose
one of three editing modes: full-featured, Easy (the old Magic Style
Movie Wizard) or Slideshow Maker. In theory this will help beginners
create clips more quickly by jumping straight to one of the automated
wizards, but for most people it’ll just get in the way, and they’ll
probably check the box to avoid ever displaying it again.
Much more usefully, heading into the Audio Mixing Room now reveals a
button which can normalize the volume of multiple audio files in a
click: very handy, and not before time.
There’s more content available: more video tutorials, and more
slideshow templates. CyberLink’s DirectorZone site (integrated with
PowerDirector) now includes more than 200,000 templates, effects and
menus; tracking down the best of these can take a while, but it’s still
an extremely valuable resource.
And once you’ve finished, PowerDirector 10 can now output 3D discs
(DVD, AVCHD, BD) and upload to more websites (YouTube 3D, Vimeo,
DailyMotion), as well as supporting the regular disc, YouTube and
Facebook options.
The performance improvements alone are enough to justify moving to
PowerDirector 10, then. And the new 3D support will be a welcome bonus
to many. But even if we ignore those, there are plenty of other smaller
tweaks which provide new creative possibilities and will help to make
you just a little more productive. It’s an impressive package which
reaffirms PowerDirector’s position as the leading consumer video editor:
if you’re unhappy with your current editor, particularly for
performance reasons, then you really should give PowerDirector 10 Ultra a try.
The software is available fo Windows XP, Vista or 7 -- all 32 and 64-bit editions -- and retails for $99.95.

Kodu Game Lab is for building games!

Originally called Boku, Kodu is a programming environment designed by Microsoft for Windows and the Xbox 360.

Matthew MacLaurin,
the director of the Redmond FUSE (Future Social Experiences) Lab and
the game’s creator, designed Kodu to allow children to actively engage
with computers rather than experiencing them passively. Kodu enables you
to build games using a series of visual elements in a rich 3D
environment, without having to learn a single line of code. Microsoft describe Kodu Game Lab as being ‘… designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone.’

The core of Kodu Game Lab is its intuitive user interface.
From the interface, you choose visual commands to determine the
actions of the characters and environment, rather than having to type
lines of code to build your games. Think of the commands as rules that
the game characters and objects must follow.
In the example above, whenever the character sees an apple, they will
move toward it. At the same time, whenever the character bumps into an
apple, they will eat it.

What isn’t it?

While what you can build with Kodu is significant, there are limits
to what you can achieve. Building games of expansive size with countless
characters will tax the Kodu Game Engine.
Luckily, Kodu has a built in indicator to let you know when you’re stretching the game engine beyond it’s capacity.A
thermometer to the right of the screen indicates clearly whether your
game is becoming too big to manage. If it is, it’s a simple matter of
reducing the size of the game space, or removing peripheral characters
from the game.
That’s not to say that Kodu can’t be used for building games of
surprising complexity! What you can achieve with Kodu can be surprising.

Where do I start?

Start simple
There are a number of ways of approaching building a game, but our
suggestion initially is to keep it simple. Our suggestion for your first
attempt at building a game is to create a simple environment, and then
program a bot (one of the characters you can place within the game) to
perform some simple actions.GDC 2009 review of Kodu
In this review by GDC, make shortly after the release of Kodu in
2009, the compares discuss the basic principles behind the game.GDC reviewGet some inspiration!
Watching what other users have created is always a great way to get ideas, and see how they have approached the game.RPG ExampleSpace DungeonsDownload and edit
Download some of the games already created
on the Planet Kodu website. You’ll also want to try the dozens of games
that come preloaded with the Kodu Game Lab software. Play the games,
look at the way the characters have been programmed, and then try to
replicate it in your own game.Final Note: Kodu Game Lab for PC is still in Beta,
but the most recent version has removed the majority of bugs, and is now
considered to be a far more stable release.